Who hasn’t thought of giving a new touch to their home or business by replacing their old wooden doors with new ones? Not only the design is important when making the right choice. There are technical details that we must know since a wooden door is the carpentry element that suffers the most in a space due to its frequency of use.
One of the most important factors to take into account is the internal composition of the door leaf. We can find in the market hollow doors or solid doors with all their intermediate variants.
A hollow wooden door is one that consists of an internal wooden skeleton finished on both sides with boards of different thicknesses. The interior is empty or only contains a simple cardboard frame. The thickness of the boards is very important in this type of door as they are the ones that will give the door resistance to any impact.
A solid wood door, however, consists of particleboard or fiberboard that runs the full thickness of the door itself. On the perimeter these boards are reinforced with solid wood slats, so that the hanging hardware, hinges or hinges, are attached to really strong elements.
The difference between both types of doors lies in quality, impact resistance, acoustic insulation, thermal insulation…
But there is another difference that must be taken into account for your choice and that is the weight of the door itself. A large wooden door will have a thickness greater than the 35-40mm of a standard door, so its composition must be carefully studied to avoid a leaf that, due to excessive weight, is almost impossible to hang or eventually ends up doing so.
There are lightened solid boards with thicknesses of up to 50-60mm which, reinforced on the perimeter with solid wood, work very well for these doors of special dimensions. But also a skeleton filled with insulating materials _ rock wool, polyester fiber, injected polyurethane? is a good choice that also meets other types of acoustic or thermal requirements. In the latter case, the dimension and distribution of this wooden skeleton is important to solve the stability of the door itself to deformations or warping.
Another important element of a wooden door is the type of frame. The frame is the one that will support the weight of the leaf, so its thickness will be decisive to withstand certain efforts.
Door frames can be made of a wide variety of materials: MDF, solid wood, aluminum, galvanized steel, stainless steel and different technical and aesthetic reasons for choosing one or the other.
Generally, standardized doors are accompanied by MDF frames, finished with natural wood veneers, lacquered or finished with melamine papers. In public buildings with high traffic of people and buildings with high humidity content, _sanitary buildings, educational buildings, swimming pools…_ aluminum or steel frames are more recommendable. And it is common to find solid wood frames on doors with special dimensions.
Depending on the type of door opening, hinged, swinging, sliding, folding… there are different hanging hardware: hinges, spade hinges, concealed hinges, pivoting systems, folding, sliding with upper guide… These fittings _which represent an important economic part in the final cost of a wooden door_ are the ones that will ensure the correct functioning of a door over time.
A door hangs down because its hinges do not support the necessary weight, a sliding door stops sliding smoothly if its bearings have deteriorated and a pivot door does not tilt correctly if its axis is not correct.
But there are other hardware that we do not pay attention to and that are key at a technical and aesthetic level. We are not only referring to handles or knobs, locks and locks, but to those others that are really the ones that allow the operation of the previous ones, the latches.
Data such as the distance to the point of a lock, or the distance to the shaft are key to making not only a door open and close properly, but also to making the door as a whole an admirable piece of design.
Handle trims that are stuck to the doorknob due to a too short distance to the point, latch fronts that stick out on one side of the door because their dimension has not been taken into account in relation to the thickness of the door _it is common in doors that have been lowered to be flush and that have not been carefully studied_, are elements that can spoil the quality of a well-built door.
It is complex to summarize all the technical defects or successes that we can find in a door but Gubia, with its technical department can help you to clarify many of them and provide solutions so that you never regret the final decision.
Visit our section for further reference. More information about wooden doors:
Versatility of pivot doors in contemporary designs . Technical tips for choosing the right wood doors . How to choose a wood door. Technical details . Three considerations before choosing your wood door. Design . Ornamentation and spaciousness through wood pivot doors . Invisible wooden doors . Custom wood carpentry in Seville . Bamboo doors an ecological alternative to design.
